Back To Front: Sports Illustrated To Debut New Design Structure
By Eric Fisher, Staff Writer, SportsBusiness Journal
Sports Illustrated this week will unveil a new design structure to its venerable print title, continuing a run in recent years of visual tinkering by SI Group Editor Terry McDonell. Among the latest changes are a move of the sport-specific Inside columns from the back of the magazine to the front, a redesigned table of contents that more overtly uses photographic cues, an expanded Leading Off section, new typographic fonts and enlarged and colorized versions of columnist drawings such as those for Dan Patrick and the stable of back-page writers. Also, the magazine will feature a weekly print version of The Vault, the archive section introduced last year online, as well as much more extensive touting of content on SI.com. "We weren't broken, but you have to be constantly changing and staying fresh," McDonell said. "This feels good. It's not really a redesign, but us fooling around with the architecture. But it's bouncier. It's livelier, and it gives a better framework to do the substantial non-fiction we're doing every week." The new format was originally set to debut last fall, but McDonell held off, instead opting for a series of focus groups first to refine the plan. The new format was not driven by the battered economy, he said, but the movement of the sport-specific columns will create some new advertising adjacencies the magazine hopes will be in strong demand, even as McDonell intends for those features to become more edgy and provocative in tone. The print version of The Vault, meanwhile, will feature a subsection of SI covers from that particular week in prior years, not unlike the yesteryear charts of top albums and songs McDonell ran during his time as managing editor of Rolling Stone. The new-look SI will also maintain its commitment to long-form journalism, he said. McDonell: "SI readers want those big, long memorable stories. Long-form narrative journalism still has a core place here."
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